Cheap AR
AR is the new VR that never was.
Virtual Reality promised to create engrossing environments to fool the senses and transport the participant to amazing places and magical experiences. There are a few efforts still moving in that direction, but have drifted away from the head tracking helmets and input gloves used in earlier efforts and more into an externalized (from the perspective of the participant) infrastructure: surrounding the subject with lots of screens and integrating with more natural input modes. High-speed 3D has been a nice addition too, but the cost and inherent limitations of the infrastructure are still a limiting factor.
Enter Augmented Reality, stage left. This has been an interesting evolution, and is still in its early stages of development as the mechanics and utility of features are worked out. It started, interestingly enough, as part of VR directly – incorporation of real details into virtual environments and the reverse. It’s migrated away from the high-cost infrastructure and the gargoyle-like wearable computing that promised to make it portable into handsets – now ubiquitous technology with increasingly powerful computing performance. These are capable of motion-matching the surrounding environment and overlaying positional, geographic, or interactive elements onto a camera-captured realtime view, or in some creative instances literally projecting an interface onto something else and measuring interaction that way. One of the common themes of the camera-augmented view is the attempt to create a 3-dimensional feel: the view has essentially been downsampled to 2D, so stereoscopy isn’t an option, and instead other standard 3D presentation mechanisms are used such as shading, occlusion, distance cues, etc., positionally represented based on the relative angle between the view and the virtual object. This is an interesting hack of modest utility, and when combined with viewer tracking can create some very convincing effects.
This morning I saw an unlikely (or at least unexpected) implementation of the concept on my way in to work that has started me thinking. A 3D rendered scene (very simple, a few gift-wrapped packages) was shown on a digital billboard (in 2D of course, though given the distance the stereoscopy is essentially uniformly columnated anyway), and had a virtual camera shift on the display which corresponded roughly (and I do mean roughly) with the anticipated perspective shift of a driver moving at average speed on the freeway. There were some aspects that made it less convincing, such as the vertical offset being mismatched (the camera was looking slightly down on the package, as opposed to the driver’s lower perspective) and the horizontal shift speed being off, but the gimmick caught my attention enough to get me thinking about the possibilities – especially the integration of time/condition aware presentation for lighting and shading, and what could be done with very little work to make it far more immersive. I’m not even sure that their use of the effect was intentional or if they were just happening to use fancy graphics while I was coincidentally driving by in a way to perceive it as such. No matter what, it was nifty and I’m sure we can expect to see more of it.
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